The Parts of Her Speech

“One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day American people, Joe Six Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again.”

“If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for for all of us.”

Don’t try to scan Sarah Palin’s syntax; don’t even bother making fun of it. By now we all know that she can’t think and talk at the same time on the national stage. What interests me more is what her particular kind of incoherence reveals about her as a political figure. Palin’s sentences quickly clot up with nouns, but you can wait a long time before you’ll hear a verb. Sometimes most of a paragraph can go by without one. Gerunds and participles abound—a tic she might have picked up when she was a sports newscaster (“Beckett waving off the sign, really taking his time out there—the breaking ball not there for him tonight”). But she can fill up a lot of her ninety seconds without ever getting to the main action of the sentence. (Read James Wood on the broader Republican problem with language.)

Palin’s candidacy is pure identity politics—a play for Christian conservatives, women, and anyone who resents the coastal big-city know-it-alls. The only verb that matters in identity politics is “to be.” What does Palin offer these voters? Herself. String along a chain of nouns in the form of politically symbolic platitudes—“Hockey Mom Pitbull Joe Six Pack Wasilla Main Street Reform Soccer Mom Every Day American People Maverick”—and you have practically the whole of her program, her policies, her world view. Palin’s self-infatuation is staggering: asked any question, she describes herself, again and again. It’s the opposite of empathy and identification with others. No one with a sharp, clear image in her head of a hard-pressed American would use a term like “Joe Six Pack,” an insulting cliché on the order of “the little people.”

If Sarah Palin had more than Sarah Palin to offer—if she wanted to do something for ordinary Americans besides invoke them—she would have to start using more verbs. And because this is a year when nouns aren’t enough, her popularity has begun to collapse.